The UT MARA Debating Society and student affairs department from Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia (UiTM) organized an international online debate tournament known as Restricted MARA Open (RMO) in July 2020.
This program successfully gathered about 300 participants from established universities in the world including Harvard University and Cambridge Union Society. The RMO aimed to allow the debating circuit to be filled with diversity due to the accessibility and outreach via the online platform.
This online tournament aimed to ensure that debaters were able to debate in spite of physical challenges due to COVID-19. The motion in the tournament was centered around international relations, education, philosophy, and legal issues that require debaters to think the motions critically and rationally.
Apart from that, this tournament offered a training ground for top-notch teams to train for the other international major tournaments.
Our spectacular adjudication core of RMO 2020 comprised Silla Alam from UT MARA, Brian Wong from the University of Oxford, and Inna Fermin from Ateneo de Manila University. The adjudicators from across the globe judged the tournament with diverse feedback.
The tournament ended by having Avinash and Wee Ern from Malaysia’s Worlds School A&W team as the champions for the Open Grand Finals. While Arjun Gunalan and Muikhail Taufiq as the champions from Malaysia’s Worlds School More and More team in the Novice Grand Finals
International participants gave positive feedback regarding the way the whole program was facilitated and smoothly run. Many UiTM participants responded that “the tournament was very beneficial due to different exposure and different points of views from participants who came from various parts of the world uniting for the love of debating”.
“We hope that online tournaments will still be held in the future for great debaters to gain experience, from the comfort of their home as well as making debating an accessible sport,” said Silla Alam, UT MARA adjudication core for RMO 2020.